I definitely think that there is a HUGE window of opportunity to get new
adoptees of Firebird out there. We went through the 'Open Source Database
Analysis process' last year, and here is why we chose Firebird (the options
we checked against were MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird). I'm sure thousands
of others are in the same decision making boat:

1. Firebird is the only one to offer BOTH a server deployment and an
embedded database. This is critical if you are giving someone a free,
single user 30 day trial of a program before they purchase a full network
installation of it. I don't want to install database servers on their
single user PC, and I don't want to have to write multiple different
database access layers in our software.

2. Only Firebird and MySQL natively install on Windows. PostgreSQL
requires Cygwin, which turns off most Windows people.

3. Firebird offers stored procedure support. This is critical to us as
we like to embed the data management routines for our database into the
database itself, rather than have this run on the clients. This allows us
to produce a very thin client application. MySQL (other than the v5
release) doesn't have stored procedure support. PostgreSQL does, but isn't
available natively in Windows.

4. The Firebird community rocks!

Hence Firebird is the winner for us.

Now onto the technical merits of it....

Myles

===========================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
Web: www.techsol.org

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Summers [mailto:SESummers@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 9:33 AM
> To: Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Firebird-general] Re: Article
>
> I <sesummers@...> wrote in message
> news:GJEALJHCCCJEIBHPDHMBIEHJEEAA.SESummers@......
> > ...
> > This was all interesting to ME, but it wasn't really that technical.
> > Is this DDJ article material? Does it show off Firebird in
> > interesting ways?
> > I don't know.
> >
> > If the answer is yes, and the deadline isn't too soon, and the
> > project not too large, and nobody more qualified than me wants to
> > do it, I'll do it. I know that's a lot of "ifs", but my guess is
> > it's the same if's that are stopping any of the other candidates
> > from discussing doing it themselves.
>
> I've thought about this some more, and reviewed the articles in my
> last few issues of DDJ, and found that there ARE a few reasonably
> simple articles like "Implementing Screen Savers in .NET" to go along
> with the horribly complex "Motion Estimation and MPEG Encoding" type
> articles- and of course, they publish Chaos Manor, which isn't
> particularly technical. None of the articles are all that long, so
> the time investment can't be more than a few days' worth. I can spare
> that much time over the next month pretty easily.
>
> What I'm thinking is that rather than attempting to write an article
> that goes into deep technical detail about a single subject like
> Events, or UDFs, or whatever, what if I did one that "hits the
> highlights" of what makes FB so nice? I could discuss how easy FB is
> to install and deploy, show a few simple triggers and stored
> procedures, demonstrate the use of triggers to generate events to
> notify the client to reload cached tables, and then explain UDFs and
> show my RTFSearch UDF source.
>
> These would all be covered as examples taken from a real-world
> business application- my RAID (Requirements And Issues Database)
> program. It wouldn't be that technical, but it would be an
> opportunity to mention SEVERAL of the reasons why FB is such a good
> choice for small to medium size business applications.
>
> This sort of fits what Mr. Erickson meant by "a project article", I
> think. It doesn't exactly fit their "Author Guidelines" on the web
> site, but it might work OK for this purpose.
>
> Ann, if you agree that this sounds like a reasonable approach, and
> nobody from the firebird-devel forum wants to take this on either,
> please send me privately Mr. Erickson's e-mail address, and I'll take
> it from there.
>
>
>
>
>
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